Group waiting for action on Code Pink digs

Kristinn Taylor, co-leader of the D.C. chapter of FreeRepublic.com, is hoping that the city eventually addresses the de-facto hotel/lobbying operation run by the group Code Pink from a residentially zoned five-bedroom row house at 712 Fifth St. NE.

Mr. Taylor’s puzzlement is understandable, for the Code Pink provocateurs advertise the apparent zoning violations on their Web site, www.codepink4peace.org.

“The bedrooms vary in size and can house two to four activists in each,” the far-left group writes in the D.C. section of the site.

The Code Pinkies say the brownstone can handle as many as 20 activists at a time, which is an apparent violation of the District’s zoning laws regarding residential properties.

Mr. Taylor says he and his band of freedom-loving patriots descend on the Code Pink headquarters each Wednesday night to point out the egregious housing violation of a group that has an affinity for Hugo Chavez and Marxist ideology.

“I don’t like Code Pink personally,” Mr. Taylor said yesterday. “But this housing situation has been so blatant on their part that we felt we should be out there to raise the issue.”

Mr. Taylor says Judicial Watch filed a complaint against Code Pink with the D.C. Zoning Administrator in May.

The bureaucracy sometimes moves in mysterious ways, as we learned in the matter of the laughably absurd Apostles of Peace and Unity in Georgetown last year.

The nine Georgetown students who lived in the five-bedroom row house in the 1600 block of 35th Street Northwest employed the religious maneuver to circumvent city zoning law that permits no more than six unrelated persons to a residence.

The city eventually ordered the students into compliance, although perhaps not as quickly as neighbors would have liked.

The seeming flouting of a zoning law has been the sustenance driving Mr. Taylor and his supporters.

Mr. Taylor, 44, a resident of Silver Spring, says Code Pink also brings a slogan-ridden tour bus into the neighborhood, which stresses parking availability there.

Mr. Taylor’s cause is supported by neighbors who find the Code Pink living arrangements to be a bane on their quality of life. They have complained of trash problems, noise issues and strangers passing through the Code Pink front door at all hours of the day.

Residents thought they were living in a quiet neighborhood until one day they woke up next to a flophouse, the so-called D.C. Activist Home, as it is billed on the Code Pink Web site.

“The news media is generally willing to give them a free pass,” Mr. Taylor said. “They thrive on attention and attracting lost souls to their group.”

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